I'm more comfortable with the environment set up as I prefer (which basically means four Xterms open). We prefer the familar, and working with the unfamiliar requires more adjustment and mental energy for the same results.

That said, sometimes diagramming things or writing down pseudo code is very helpful. It forces you to think about the correctness of your solution and the design, rather than the mechanics of making the thing run. I still have trouble reading long sections of code out of books, though, which is odd after all this time.

I have a bad habit of writing just enough stub code to test, and then alternating between testing and adding slightly more code. That's good in some cases, but I think I'd be more efficient if I programmed bigger chunks at once.

Either way, you should not count lines in a file with a one-liner like this, even if it's shorter. It frightens people:

perl -pe "END{ die }" file_name >/dev/null